writing

reading, writing, and commenting

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

1) I miss director’s commentary tracks.

One thing that I miss about DVDs is the director’s commentary tracks (or commentary tracks in general, although, in general, directors and writers are — in my experience — more interesting than actors to listen to). Not that DVDs don’t exist anymore, but in a lot of cases they no longer have commentary tracks, presumably because more and more people watch movies on streaming services and fewer and fewer on DVDs, so it’s not worth the effort.

So, it was pleasant to find that Rian Johnson recorded a commentary track for Glass Onion, a movie I enjoyed a lot. (I enjoyed Knives Out, too, and I have no interest in thinking about which is better, but Glass Onion is much more full of cameos and funny background details, so the commentary track is fun.)

 
2. Writing.

I’m holding off on starting a new story for the moment, since the four I’ve posted so far all needed a little sprucing up.

I’m not rewriting or anything like that — just a little tweak here and there. Mostly swapping out words for better words, and adjusting (and, I hope, improving) punctuation. “The Marvel Murder Case” and “The Town Hall Mystery” are done. I’m currently about halfway through “The Deacon Mystery.”

I know, that leaves out “The Heron Island Mystery.” That’s the longest of the four, by far, and it’s the only one which needs more than tweaking. I was constantly aware when writing it that it was going to end up much longer than I’d hoped. It’s 35,000 words, definitely a novella, and longer than “The Town Hall Mystery” and “The Deacon Mystery” put together.

But stories find their own length, and in worrying about how long it was becoming, I see now that I left out at least two small scenes which should be there. So, in addition to the tweaking, I’ll be adding a couple of things. Ironically, despite being, so I thought, “too long,” it’s actually been, until now, a bit too short.

 
3. Reading.

This article caused a bit of a stir earlier this year: “The End of the English Major.”

Here are a couple of responses from the New York Times:

I think this is interesting, but not, for me, personally compelling. Of the enduring cultural enthusiasms of my life, none of them were acquired at school. James Joyce comes the closest, since I did study that in college and I don’t think I’d read much Joyce before, but that’s not a top tier passion. My experience of formal education is that it has squashed more possible passions than it ever encouraged (to this day, I cringe at the idea of ever opening Moby Dick again).

That being said, I do like the idea of college as a way of educating people, rather than just training them for some future job. I had a friend when I was in college who wanted to become a doctor, and he said that a lot of his fellow future doctors had chosen a pre-med major very early on, but he’d chosen another major (I forget what), partly because he wanted a broader education, and partly because his research had shown that a lot of top medical schools were leaning toward applicants who had a more general undergraduate education, because there was a theory that they made better doctors.

I thought of this when I was considering the movie Eyes Wide Shut recently. I hadn’t liked it much when it was in theaters, but I’ve been watching some videos about it recently, and that’s made me think about it again. The central character is Dr. Bill Harford, a very successful M.D., and it suddenly struck me that he might be a perfect example of what happens when you focus throughout your higher education on the single goal of becoming a doctor.

Being a doctor is clearly his entire identity. He flashes some sort of medical ID card at everybody like it’s a badge, he barely interacts with his daughter, and it’s clearly never occurred to him that his wife is a three-dimensional human being. Has he ever read a book or seen a play? He treats the rich and powerful, but he has no idea how money or power actually work. He is amazed and alarmed to find out that his wife has a history and an interior life. He’s like a boy from junior high school who was yanked from the playground, given medical training and a degree, and who has been completely insulated from reality ever since by lots of prestige and cash.

So, yes, let’s focus some energy on the “humanities.”

“real” reading, hypertext writing (and reading), and semicolons

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

I saw a couple of interesting articles on the WIRED magazine website:

1) “Is Listening to Audiobooks Really Reading? (WIRED’s spiritual advice columnist on bardic traditions for a modern age—and why book snobs worry about the wrong things.)”

(I had a whole rant written about this, but then I remembered that I don’t do rants. There are enough of those on the internet as it is.)

 
2) “Why No One Clicked on the Great Hypertext Story“

I’ve written about hypertext stories before, and I’ve written a hypertext story.

I’m sort of thinking of writing another one, not because I want to write a hypertext story, but because some stories naturally go in that direction.

So, here are the reasons that I think hypertext stories didn’t catch on:

1) In my experience, the only audience for hypertext stories is people who write hypertext stories. I’ve never written stories in Esperanto (obviously), but I think writing in hypertext is probably like writing in Esperanto, as far as the potential audience goes.

2) Writing hypertext is a lot of work. As I wrote before: “If you wrote a 5,000-word short story, with just one ‘fork in the road,’ that would end up being two 5,000-word stories, each of which has to work. From then on, for each new fork, you can do the math.”

So, compared to a regular story, more work and fewer possible readers.

3) Here’s another factor I just thought of. My first hypertext story was written back in the early 1990s, not long after the Web was invented — and before a lot of people (including me) had internet access (and when a lot of the “internet access” available didn’t even include the Web).

I downloaded a program from a BBS which enabled the creation of the hypertext story, and then you uploaded the text and a “reader” program to BBSs for people to download and run on their own computers. I even paid the guy who wrote the program to add one more feature to a special version for me.

This was a rather clumsy system, and I don’t think it had a lot of downloads, but one advantage was that it was not a Web page. Writing stories on the Web (which I do, obviously) means they’re just more Web pages. That may be one reason I make the HTML versions, which can be downloaded and printed, or loaded on Kindles or other e-readers.

A novel, for example, should be a discrete thing, maybe on paper or maybe as an e-book, but it’s not the same if it’s just pages scattered through the Sunday NY Times.

This is exacerbated in hypertext, because the way I’d want to do a hypertext story would require conditional links — where the same link would go do different locations depending on various conditions. (The Web is not designed that way, nor should it be, since I can only imagine the nefarious purposes for which it would be used. But if there was a hypertext system which wasn’t the Web, which could operate according to different rules, that would be interesting.)

(There was something called XML, which at some point was supposed to be the next step beyond HTML — the code behind every website — but it didn’t take off the way it was originally supposed to. It’s used in Web pages, but it has to be accessed by regular old HTML. You can’t just create Web pages entirely in XML and have browsers display them, so the parts of the XML standard which I wanted to use didn’t pan out.)

I use the Web because it’s there. It’s the easiest way to do something that’s like what I want to do, and it means I can concentrate on the writing rather than trying to figure out how to become a programmer, too.

And, of course, even if I did become a programmer and create the hypertext structure I’d want for a specific project, see the point above about audience.

 
You know what I do like? Books about punctuation.

I just bought the book, I’ll report back when I’ve read it.

 
Also, this is charming, and also sensible: “Game of Thrones author George RR Martin: ‘Why I still use DOS’“

(Part of the enjoyment, I confess, is to read an article about using DOS written by somebody who obviously never used DOS and doesn’t really understand what it was.)

rewriting and writing again (and bloomsday)

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

1) June 16, 1904, is the day the novel Ulysses, by James Joyce, takes place, so June 16 is celebrated as Bloomsday. Ulysses was published in 1922, making this year the hundredth anniversary of the book. When I realized this, I decided to post a blog post linking to the various posts I’ve written over the years about Ulysses and Bloomsday.

However, careful research revealed that there really aren’t any. A few posts say things like, “Hey, it’s Bloomsday! Everybody should celebrate!” — but there’s no point in linking back to those.

Oh, well. As much as I enjoy Ulysses (perhaps I’ll read it again this year, in honor of the anniversary…), it’s not likely I’d have much new and significant to say about it. Quite a few people have written about it already, after all.

 
2) Again on the subject of “how to write good,” I remember a lot of blog posts (back in the days of blog posts) about the importance of editing. Do whatever you need to do to generate some sort of first draft, then the real work begins: editing, editing, and more editing.

Sometimes, yes, of course. But it is also possible that your attempts to beat every page, paragraph, and sentence into submission will pound all the life out of the whole thing until you just have a series of perfectly formed sentences. Now, I’m really into perfectly formed sentences, but there are times (as with part nine of my current story, which took quite a while to get posted) that more and more editing is not the answer.

In those cases, I’ve found it best to put the draft (and all of its edits and versions) away, get out a fresh piece of paper and a pen, re-read the previous part to remember who’s in the scene and what they know (and don’t know) and what they’re trying to do, and set them off, writing down whatever happens. That’s what I finally did with part nine, and it got me about 90% of the way to the final version, which is farther than I got with all the cutting and pasting and cutting and pasting.

how to write good

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

1) I used to read quite a few blogs by aspiring writers* (back before that blog world was swallowed up by social media), and there were always “helpful” bits of “wisdom” being thrown around, like “adverbs = bad” and “kill your darlings” (in other words, whatever you most love in your story, take it out**) and “never have a preface — always start in medias res” and “if there’s a gun, it has to go off at some point” and so on.

All of these are interesting, more or less, and all of them are easily refuted by great novels by great writers.

Another one was that the key to any story is conflict (the more the better), so I was glad to read this:

Without quite knowing why, I’ve always disliked the truism that conflict is drama’s fundamental ingredient. Yes, we fight and cajole and coax and settle scores: that’s our species, and it’s frequently how we show ourselves onstage. But this bit of craft wisdom—conflict is king—is the handmaiden of a paranoid anthropology, and a limited way of thinking about action and speech. We humans do much more than struggle, will against will. And our talk isn’t strictly coefficient with our need to act upon or influence others for our own ends. Often, to the contrary, it springs from a mysterious overflow of unbidden feeling, more a free gift of sound and syntax—of humor, of love—than a blunt instrument of acquisition. [From this review]

____________
* I frequently had to clarify that I myself am not an “aspiring” writer. I am exactly the type of writer I want to be, and my only aspiration is to get a bit better at it.
** “Be willing to kill your darlings, if necessary,” is actually tolerable advice.

 
2) Legends of Tomorrow was canceled — there will be no Season 8. Some people are really upset about this (particular because, with Batwoman being canceled at the same time, that’s a whole lot of diversity gone from the world of TV superheroes in one day), but I’m okay with it. With long-running TV shows, some people apparently want a final episode to wrap everything up, but I don’t. I prefer to think they whole story is still going on. Do you want Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson to have a retirement party?

Besides, there was a “the Legends all retire” episode, it just wasn’t the last episode of the last season, which was a cliffhanger. It was the episode right before that. So, you can pick whichever ending you want.

 
3) Moon Knight is done, and I was really glad I subscribed to Disney+ to see it. Pleasantly, it did not depend on my having seen all the other Marvel movies and TV shows. I saw an article that said people are tweeting jokes about how much homework and research you have to do to really understand the new Dr. Strange movie.

The best part of the series was the fifth episode (of six) where the plot stopped completely to delve really deeply into the main character’s DID (dissociative identity disorder) and what caused it. Oscar Isaac (who plays Moon Knight) did an amazing job at showing the different alters and their history. I’ve seen videos by DID systems saying that this was, overall, a good representation of DID (compared to the usual, where there’s often one alter who’s a serial killer or something like that). Since I write (very obliquely) about DID, I’ve learned a lot from this myself.

Moon Knight may or may not get a second season or a movie, but the season we have ended well, and now I can cancel my Disney+ subscription and go back to focusing on The Witcher.

(And I’m thinking it may be time to watch the third season of Twin Peaks…)

when is a script not a script?

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

This is sort of a continuation of my last post.

Another thing I liked was this interview with David Lynch.

Specifically this part:

The A.V. Club: With Inland Empire, I understand there wasn’t a full script before production. Were you writing scenes as you went along?

David Lynch: Let’s clear this up. When you write a script, at least what my experience has been, you don’t suddenly see the whole script and spit it out and type it out with no typos, just perfect, in one sitting. That never happens, never will happen. You get an idea, and you write that one out, then you’re going along, you don’t have any script, you had an idea and you wrote it out. Then you go along, you get another idea and you write it out. Now you have two ideas, but you don’t have a script. You go along a little bit more and you get a third idea, you write it out. And you look and you say, “Wait a minute, I have three ideas, and none of them relate to one another.” Fine! No problem. There’s no script, just three ideas that don’t relate. You go along and you get a fourth idea, and this fourth idea relates to the first three, and you say, “Oh, something’s happening.” And then, when something starts happening, more ideas flood in, quicker! Quicker they come, like schools of fish, schools of fish! And the thing starts to emerge, and a script appears. That’s exactly the way it happens. And that’s exactly the way it happened on Inland Empire.

I don’t make movies, obviously, but that’s pretty much how I work. Pieces and ideas and scenes, and then eventually they start to fit together. It’s like what happened on The Jan Sleet Mysteries — a series of detective stories that started to turn into a novel (a “stealth novel,” as I called it at the time).

What I’m doing right now is a bit of a technical experiment (I don’t think I’ve ever seen it done), and it combines a couple of different ideas, as did the story before (which is why it was longer than the first two, which were basically one-idea stories).

I wouldn’t mind writing more one-idea stories, but it’s the connections that are often the most interesting parts.

it’s nice to have one television show to follow (part two)

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

Well, I’ve watched all of the second season of The Witcher, and it was very good. In fact, there were some lessons to learn in comparison to The Wheel of Time, which is the show I watched right before The Witcher.

So, I guess this is part of my “Storytelling Lessons” series.

 
Storytelling Lessons from The Witcher

1) Be aware of which are your best characters.

I think I wrote about this before somewhere. If your reader wants to know more about A and you’re consistently giving more information about B instead, that’s a problem.

As I said about The Wheel of Time: “The show is a ‘chosen one’ story (definitely my least favorite fantasy trope), and now, of the five possible chosen ones, the least interesting character (by a wide margin) appears to be It.” That was true through to the last episode of Wheel of Time, where my favorite part was a scene between two very secondary characters.

With The Witcher, the core trio of characters, Geralt of Rivia, Yennefer of Vengerberg, and Princess Cirilla of Cintra, are the most interesting, both individually and in various combinations, and they are all played by top-notch actors. There are a lot of good supporting characters around them, but the supporting characters do exactly that: support, rather than outshine.

 
2) Heroes are okay, but you need at least one good villain (I think of this as the “Hitchcock Rule”), and your villains should be at least as complex as your heroes.

This is one of my main complaints about a lot of comic book movies these days (and, for that matter, The Wheel of Time): villains who, for undefined or uncompelling reasons want to conquer, or remake, or destroy the world. Yawn. Also, it’s an interesting contrast with murder mysteries (this just occurred to me): Good mystery stories require a good motive for the murderer(s). You can go with plain old lunacy as a motivation, but it’s difficult to carry off. Ellery Queen managed it several times, but the lunacy in his books was always highly structured — killers who killed according to specific patterns. And lunatic killers can work better in movies, because: acting!

In general, though, understandable motivations are the best. (Orson Welles, however, had a different opinion, which I talked about here in relation to Iago.)

Everybody in The Witcher has motivations, though often hidden ones, including the monsters. Geralt spends some time defending Ciri against various monsters, until she realizes — and then convinces him — that the monsters are indeed trying to get to her, but they actually never try to harm her. (Geralt, of course, expressed his opinion of this idea with a grunt — his most common reaction to anything — but it was clearly an interested grunt.) The last episode of the season was, among other things, a series of revelations of motivations, and hints of some motivations which won’t be revealed until later seasons.

* * * * *

In other news, I’m very close to starting to post a new story. The first part is basically ready to post (well, I’ll probably read it over just one more time…), and I have three more parts more or less ready to go.